Lei Mao: So sounds like you don’t need to know anything and there is no prerequisite in order to do life science studies. This is true to some extent. Otherwise you would not see there are so many middle school or high school students spending their summer doing life science research in some labs. The … Continue reading Reasons Not to Study Life Science or Anything Related →

Matt Weber: As an AoPS Academy campus director, a big part of my job is meeting with parents of prospective students. One of the most common complaints I hear is that their children never show any work. Parents are surprised when I push back, gently, on the underlying assumptions. In fact, showing work is sometimes … Continue reading Why Won’t My Child Show Any Work? →

James Hatch: My first class of the semester was absolutely terrifying. I don’t know if it was for the kids in my class, but it damn sure was for me. It was a literature seminar with the amazing Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor David Quint. He is an amazing human in that he has … Continue reading My Semester With the Snowflakes →

Laura Spinney: Turchin set out to determine whether history, like physics, follows certain laws. In 2003, he published a book called Historical Dynamics, in which he discerned secular cycles in France and Russia from their origins to the end of the 18th century. That same year, he founded a new field of academic study, called … Continue reading History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future →

Reid Cramer, Fernaba R. Addo, Colleen Campbell: The Millennial generation is on a much lower trajectory of wealth accumulation than their parents and grandparents. Dramatically so. Their generational balance sheet, tabulating assets and liabilities, is historically poor. Despite its dramatic emergence and real world consequences, the Millennial wealth gap has received scant attention to date. … Continue reading K-12 Tax & SPENDING Climate: The Emerging Millennial Wealth Gap →

Logan Wroge: On Oct. 9, Anderson, who had worked at West for three years and at East High School for eight years before that, said he responded to a call about a disruptive student who was being escorted out of the school by an assistant principal. When the situation with the male student escalated, Anderson … Continue reading Black Madison school staffer appeals firing for repeating student’s racial slur →

Dan Kopf: The books are based on the concept of “statistical learning,” a mashup of stats and machine learning. The field of machine learning is all about feeding huge amounts of data into algorithms to make accurate predictions. Statistics is concerned with predictions as well, says Tibshirani, but also with determining how confident we can … Continue reading These Are the Best Books for Learning Modern Statistics—and They’re All Free →

Geoffrey Miller: Ever since grad school, I’ve been fascinated by moral hypocrisy as a hallmark of virtue signaling. People say they believe passionately in issue X, but they don’t bother to do anything real to support X. That kind of behavior seemed highly diagnostic of hypocritical signaling, and hypocritical signaling is bad, because hypocrisy is … Continue reading ‘Virtue Signalling’ May Annoy Us. But Civilization Would Be Impossible Without It →

Lucas VebberWilliam D. Flanders: The Fordham Institute’s recent survey of teachers has brought the issue of discipline reform back to the forefront. But even as teachers say that discipline policies are leading to unsafe educational environments, a new federal rule threatens to further exacerbate the issue. In the final month of the Obama Administration, the … Continue reading An Obama-era regulation is likely to establish unconstitutional racial quotas →

Daniel Barth, Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom: Our use of the EA score as a measure of biological traits linked to human capital is related to previous attempts in the literature to measure ability through the use of tests scores such as IQ or the AFQT…We note two important differences between the EA score … Continue reading Genetic Endowments and Wealth Inequality →

Jonathan Zittrain: Like many medications, the wakefulness drug modafinil, which is marketed under the trade name Provigil, comes with a small, tightly folded paper pamphlet. For the most part, its contents—lists of instructions and precautions, a diagram of the drug’s molecular structure—make for anodyne reading. The subsection called “Mechanism of Action,” however, contains a sentence … Continue reading The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking →

Kaleem Caire, writing within Facebook’s walled garden. Via a kind reader: The Capital Times published my editorial below on March 12, 2019. I then posted the article on my FB page the same day. This terrible, awful and destructive generational disease didn’t get nearly the same rise out of people as me imploring our children … Continue reading COPS IN SCHOOLS or BLACK KIDS CAN READ? →

Holly Else: “This is terrible for the field, as it is for any field”, in particular because the investigator’s grants could have gone to more deserving researchers, says James Brown, a cancer researcher at the National University of Ireland Galway. Many scientists have used the Nature paper to build an understanding of DNA-repair processes mediated … Continue reading Top journals retract DNA-repair studies after misconduct probe →

Neil Irwin: A new report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank funded in large part by tech investors and entrepreneurs, adds rich new detail, showing that parts of the United States are already grappling with Japanese-caliber demographic decline — 41 percent of American counties with a combined population of 38 million. At … Continue reading K-12 Tax &Spending Climate: America’s Biggest Economic Challenge May Be Demographic Decline →

Luca Dellana: The fact that (almost) all degrees have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field is the best evidence that education has been built around the universities’ needs, not the students’.

Gehl Porter: Our political system will not be self-correcting. The problems are systemic and structural, involving multiple factors that are self-reinforcing. This means that the only way to reform the system is by taking a set of steps to change the industry structure and the rules that underpin it—shifting the very nature of political competition. … Continue reading Politics and Anti-Trust →

Chad Aldeman: But this result is impossible. According to the same official state projections that Rhee and Joyner apply to their sample, Colorado’s teacher pension plan assumes that 37 percent of males and 34 percent of females will leave in their first year, let alone make it to five years. Rhee and Joyner are trying … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Teacher Pensions and Accurate Accounting →

SG Cheah: Professor Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist mentioned how males tend to be more skilled than females at civil discourse. He opines the reason behind that was because all face-to-face discussions between males were backed by the underlying threat of violence. Males tend to be better at logical and controlled debates because males are … Continue reading Civics: Civility on the Decline — A Crisis in Free Speech and Violence →

Jeff Sypeck: But when you look at the manuscripts, the classroom texts, and the teaching methods of the early Middle Ages, you find habits and practices that I think would warm the hearts of pretty much everybody in this room. You find, for example, an obsessive attention to what today we would refer to as … Continue reading You find, for example, an obsessive attention to what today we would refer to as ‘literacy’ and ‘critical thinking skills’” →

Wendy Liu: My contribution to this panel will be less about the details [of how to tame the tech giants] and more about the bigger picture of what’s wrong with the way things are. I don’t know a lot about trade policy or international regulation. Instead, I’d like to take a step back to analyse … Continue reading Beyond Taming the Tech Giants →

Cindy Cohn: The world is waking up to something that digital security experts have known for a very long time: Digital security is hard. Really hard. And the larger and more complex the systems, the more difficult it is to plug all the security holes and make them secure and trustworthy. Yet security is also … Continue reading Civics: Resisting Law Enforcement’s Siren Song: A Call for Cryptographers to Improve Trust and Security →

Yoni Applebam: The results have been catastrophic. As the procedures that once conferred legitimacy on organizations have grown alien to many Americans, contempt for democratic institutions has risen. In 2016, a presidential candidate who scorned established norms rode that contempt to the Republican nomination, drawing his core support from Americans who seldom participate in the … Continue reading Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore; As participation in civic life has dwindled, so has public faith in the country’s system of government. →

Tim Martin: When I came across two books recently that try to make the subject more fun and approachable, I was initially quite sceptical. In my opinion, the main problem with statistics is not that people don’t spend time trying to learn it, but rather that they don’t properly comprehend the underlying principles. Too often … Continue reading The Manga Guide to Statistics →

Shaun Raviv and Mosaic: I told the Pates about ABC’s case and the worry that it could theoretically push the duty of care too far in the U.K. They said that their lawyer mentioned a similar concern with Heidi’s case back in the early 1990s, when HIV was still essentially untreatable and killing thousands of … Continue reading Do children have a right to their parents’ medical information? →

Tyler Cowen: So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off. Here’s the cleanest tale of hypothetical decline I could come up with, keeping away … Continue reading The Decline and Fall of the American Empire Even if you don’t think it’s likely, it’s always best to be prepared. →

Scoot Milfred and Phil Hands: Usual mumbo-jumbo, we do on this podcast. Why don’t we invite in today some experts to talk about our topic which is around school. Which Madison is finally going to give a try this fall to experts. I know very well we have all hands on deck here. We have … Continue reading “Yes, to Year Around School” Podcast Transcript (Not in the Madison School District) →

Kristine E. Guillaume: Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein ’75 praised Faust for leading Harvard through “a decade of growth and transformation” during her presidency in an emailed statement Thursday. “Her perspective and experience running one of the most complex and preeminent institutions in the world will benefit our board, our … Continue reading Days After Exiting Harvard Presidency, Faust Joins Goldman Sachs Board of Directors →

John Robb: For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them … Continue reading Centralization risks →

Elie Dolgin: Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected … Continue reading The myopia boom Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason why. →

Smithsonian: As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it … Continue reading The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation →

CÉDRIC VILLANI : Since the 1956 Dartmouth conference, artificial intelligence has alternated between periods of great enthusiasm and disillusionment, impressive progress and frustrating failures. Yet, it has relentlessly pushed back the limits of what was only thought to be achievable by human beings. Along the way, AI research has achieved significant successes: outperforming human beings … Continue reading FOR A MEANINGFUL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE →

Robin Abcarian: The question is, what is really underlying this urge to disrupt? As I read the Cal 3 website, my eyes glazing over at the bromides about lower taxes, safe streets and a stronger education system, the only concrete concept that jumped off the page at me was this: “Areas like Sacramento are currently … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: breaking up California →

Marlene Melchior: In Part 2: Diehm discusses the “echo chamber” effect of Facebook’s interface. He says that while Zuckerberg made “apologetic commitments” and rolled out an interface with new privacy controls, ultimately “there’s no transparent way of actually assessing whether or not this interface either works better or even has any meaningful effect on the … Continue reading Tactical Tech tells us what they would have asked Mark Zuckerberg →

Kyle Smith: Except if you tell them they’re jeopardizing their financial aid or their housing. Then they fold immediately. The extent of student fortitude was mapped out in a natural experiment conducted at New York University last week, when students vowed to occupy a student center around the clock (it normally closes at 11 p.m.) … Continue reading Campus governance commentary →

Coursera: For a lot of higher level courses in Machine Learning and Data Science, you find you need to freshen up on the basics in maths – stuff you may have studied before in school or university, but which was taught in another context, or not very intuitively, such that you struggle to relate it … Continue reading Mathematics for machine learning →

Marilyn Wedge: French children don’t need medications to control their behavior. In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established … Continue reading Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD →

: We have reviewed carefully your letter dated March 7, 2018. The pending Citizen Lab report concerning the use of Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices (“Report”) is a peer-reviewed, comprehensive research paper on a serious issue of significant public interest. As is its standard protocol, Citizen Lab has engaged in best practices in conducting the research underlying … Continue reading Civics: Sandvine, the first-Canadian, then-US company enabling Turkey, Syria, and Egypt to poison innocent users’ web traffic with spyware, threatened @Citizenlab to stop the report. →

Andrew McCarthy: So we arrive at the knotty question for Obama political and law-enforcement officials: How do we “engage with the incoming team” of Trump officials while also determining that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia”? How do we assure that an investigation of Trump can continue when Trump is about … Continue reading Civics: Presidents Obama, Trump, The FBI, Politics and the FISA Court →

Helen Barrett: All fintech is doing is changing the way in which financial services are delivered. It is not a transformation of the underlying principles of finance — it is focused solely on the operational implementation of it. As one dean put it to me recently, fintech is really just about writing apps. So why, … Continue reading Business schools have a problem with fintech →

NPR: What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids? That’s a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new books that arrived over the holidays. And it’s a question that inspired a team of researchers to set up a study. Specifically, they wondered how the … Continue reading What’s The Difference Between Children’s Books In China And The U.S.? →

Greg Stor: To get the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention these days, try saying your speech rights are being violated. Whether the underlying topic is abortion, elections, labor unions or wedding cakes, the First Amendment is starting to dominate the Supreme Court’s agenda. The court on Monday granted three new speech cases, including a challenge to … Continue reading Free Speech Is Starting to Dominate the U.S. Supreme Court’s Agenda →

Andre Stalz: The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still depend on submarine internet cables (the “Backbone”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the internet will lose their relevance, and the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It … Continue reading The Trinet →

Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: “Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.” It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if … Continue reading Honoring the English Curriculum and the Study of U.S. History—Sandra Stotsky →

Jorie Koster-HaleAug: Predicting future crime poses a particularly interesting data challenge because it has both geospatial and temporal dimensions and may be affected by many different types of features like weather, city infrastructure, population demographics, public events, government policy, etc. In September 2016, the National Institute of Justice launched a Real-Time Crime Forecasting Challenge to … Continue reading Predicting Crime in Portland Oregon →

NCTQ (National Council on Teacher Quality): Our nation has open teaching positions that need to be filled by trained teachers. This is not a new national crisis but rather one America has been living with for years due to our unwillingness to adopt more strategic pay approaches. With rare exceptions, states have also shown no … Continue reading Questions “National Teacher Shortage” Narrative, Releases Facts to Set the Record Straight →

Carol Christ This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance … Continue reading On free speech →

Matt Taibbi: The admission comes by way of Andrew Bailey, head of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. He said recently (emphasis mine): “The absence of active underlying markets raises a serious question about the sustainability of the LIBOR benchmarks. If an active market does not exist, how can even the best run benchmark measure it?”  As a few … Continue reading Is LIBOR, Crucial Financial Benchmark, a Lie? →

Greg McGinnis: A state pension plan’s annual funded ratio gives an end-of-fiscal-year snapshot of the assets as a proportion of the accrued liabilities. In aggregate, the funded ratio of these plans dropped to 72 percent in 2015 from 75 percent in 2014. Across the country, funded ratios for plans reviewed by The Pew Charitable Trusts … Continue reading Measuring the Fiscal Health of State Pension Plans →

Bruce Goldman: “I wanted to find and explore neural circuits that regulate specific behaviors,” says Shah, then a newly minted Caltech PhD who was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. So, he zeroed in on sex-associated behavioral differences in mating, parenting and aggression. “These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation,” says Shah, MD, PhD, … Continue reading The cognitive differences between men and women →

Alan Borsuk: t’s an emergency. It says so right there on the legal papers: “Order of the State Superintendent for Public Instruction Adopting Emergency Rules.” But it’s a curious kind of emergency. Elsewhere in the paperwork, it uses the term “difficulties.” Maybe that’s a better way to put it. Underlying the legal language lie questions … Continue reading ‘Emergency’ effort to address teacher shortages reflect larger education issues →

AEI One reason this problem is hard to tackle is that the Left and Right disagree on the ultimate cause of the bloat. Many progressives see it as a product of the free market: If students and parents select colleges based on the quality of student spas and diversity centers and other amenities, then of … Continue reading Why Higher Education Is Stagnating →

Five Books: What life exists below the surface of the earth? Previously biologists believed the only subsurface life was at the soil zone, that you go a metre down and it is inconsequential, except for in caves. But even then the people looking in caves didn’t realise the caves were being formed by sub-surface life. … Continue reading Life below the surface of the earth (and on Mars) — a Five Books interview →

Timothy Lee: Decade after decade, health care and education have gotten more expensive while the price of clothing, cars, furniture, toys, and other manufactured goods has gone down relative to the overall inflation rate — exactly the pattern Baumol predicted a half-century ago. Baumol’s cost disease is a powerful tool for understanding the modern economic … Continue reading William Baumol, whose famous economic theory explains the modern world, has died →

Hashi Mohamed: t is a common promise made to the next generation. “If you work hard, and do the right thing, you will be able to get on in life.” I believe that it is a promise that we have no capacity to fulfil. And that’s because its underlying assumptions must be revisited. Imagine a … Continue reading Telling children ‘hard work gets you to the top’ is simply a lie →

Yavuz Baydar: When I heard the news on late Tuesday night, I did not know who to pity more than the other. I knew a few of the victims, but the first one I thought was a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman; Prof İbrahim Kaboğlu, from Marmara University, a top Turkish expert on constitution and law. His … Continue reading The purge turns Turkish academia into a slaughterhouse; Turkey into an ‘intellectual desert’ →

Cal Newport On the other hand, as a writer I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media and am indifferent to my smartphone. Recently, I’ve been trying to clarify the underlying philosophy that informs how I think … Continue reading On Digital Minimalism →

Julia Friedman: In Perspectiva Corporum Regularium, Jamnitzer rotates and carves each of the solids to demonstrate how they might function as the building blocks of the world. Though science has since demonstrated the atom to be the most basic part of all matter, Jamnitzer’s studies possess a captivating artistic merit. With the manipulation, repetition, and … Continue reading The Minimalist Beauty of a Renaissance-Era Geometry Book →

nctq Why teacher prep programs should have strong preparation in elementary mathematics Teaching elementary children the fundamentals of arithmetic—dividing fractions, operations with signed numbers, or basic probability—requires a deep understanding of the underlying mathematics. For elementary teachers, it’s simply not suf cient just to know “invert and multiply.” One must know and be able to … Continue reading A Closer Look at Elementary Mathematics: Undergraduate Elementary Programs (UW-Madison Mentioned) →

Christopher Mims This is a special time for technology. Five of the world’s seven most valuable companies are U.S. tech firms. But the core innovations underlying Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. are decades old. The transistor was born in the 1940s at AT&T’s Bell Labs. The internet was nurtured … Continue reading Is Engine of Innovation in Danger of Stalling? →

Fergus Walsh Having sequenced thousands of tumour genomes, they found a 20-a-day smoker would rack up an average of 150 mutations in every lung cell each year. The changes are permanent, and persist even if someone gives up smoking. Researchers say analysing tumour DNA may help explain the underlying causes of other cancers. Pamela Pugh, … Continue reading Smoking ’causes hundreds of DNA changes’ →

Chemistry Blog Future chemistry faculty will have to be twice as smart, work with twice the efficiency, and reach the correct positions of influence if they want this type of unhealthy cultural attitudes to finally be put to rest. This is my goal at least. Update 1: Guido Koch now. Update 2: The underlying macroeconomic … Continue reading Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry →

Kolmogorov Complexity And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, each string has an equal chance (2^{-50}) in being chosen at random from all sequences of 50 binary digits. So in a sense, the huge body of mathematics underlying probability has already failed us at this basic juncture because we cannot speak of how random … Continue reading Math ∩ Programming →

asimov institute With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) can be a bit overwhelming at first. So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these … Continue reading THE NEURAL NETWORK ZOO →

Paul Ibbotson, Michael Tomasello: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many … Continue reading Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning →

The Lighthouse Are American universities approaching “Peak Administrative Bloat”? Some might think so. Consider the following job titles and salary estimates: “Principal Assistant Chancellor of the Office of Strategic Dining Technology, $180,317”; “Associate Executive for the Task Force on Donor Climate, $368,186”; “Assistant Provost for Athletic Maintenance to the Subcommittee for Neighborhood Outreach, $415,314.” Fortunately, … Continue reading Are American universities approaching “Peak Administrative Bloat”? →

Louis Kauffman This essay explores the Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce. We concentrate on his notational approaches to basic logic and his general ideas about Sign, Symbol and diagrammatic thought. In the course of this paper we discuss two notations of Peirce, one of Nicod and one of Spencer-Brown. Needless to say, a notation connotes … Continue reading The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce →

Bain & Company PDF For centuries, the cost of distance has determined where businesses produce and sell, where employers locate jobs and where families choose to live, work, shop and play. What if this cost fell dramatically, thanks to new technologies? How would the global economy change if manufacturers could produce locally in small batches, … Continue reading Spatial Economics: The Declining Cost of Distance →

The Economist: The story of the Melungeons is at once a footnote to the history of race in America and a timely parable of it. They bear witness to the horrors and legacy of segregation, but also to the overlooked complexity of the early colonial era. They suggest a once-and-future alternative to the country’s brutally … Continue reading An Appalachian people offers a timely parable of the nuanced history of race in America →

Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan, Xin-Zeng Wu: Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy … Continue reading The Majority Illusion in Social Networks →

Paul Hill: On the surface, the current dispute about Title I comparability (the requirement that schools within a district must receive comparable resources from state and local sources for education of disadvantaged children before federal funds are added on) is all about money. On one side, Secretary of Education John King is pressing for regulations … Continue reading What’s at Stake in the Ongoing Fight About School Spending Comparability? →

Open Culture: In 1972, the composer Leonard Bernstein returned to Harvard, his alma mater, to serve as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, with “Poetry” being defined in the broadest sense. The position, first created in 1925, asks faculty members to live on campus, advise students, and most importantly, deliver a series of six … Continue reading Leonard Bernstein’s Masterful Lectures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Recorded at Harvard in 1973) →

David Moreau*, Ian J. Kirk and Karen E. Waldie: The prospect of enhancing cognition is undoubtedly among the most exciting research questions currently bridging psychology, neuroscience, and evidence-based medicine. Yet, convincing claims in this line of work stem from designs that are prone to several shortcomings, thus threatening the credibility of training-induced cognitive enhancement. Here, … Continue reading Seven Pervasive Statistical Flaws in Cognitive Training Interventions →

Stanford: Yewno is a discovery tool that provides a graphical display of the interrelationships between concepts. Yewno uses computational semantics, graph theory, and machine learning to extract concepts from scholarly publications including journals, books, and theses, and displays search results in a graphical interface that displays the interrelationships between those concepts. Users can follow links … Continue reading Yewno [beta] | Stanford University Libraries →

PLOS Computational Biology: A big difference between inexperienced users of statistics and expert statisticians appears as soon as they contemplate the uses of some data. While it is obvious that experiments generate data to answer scientific questions, inexperienced users of statistics tend to take for granted the link between data and scientific issues and, as … Continue reading Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice →

norvig: I take Chomsky’s points to be the following: Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science. Accurately modeling linguistic facts is just butterfly collecting; what matters in science (and specifically linguistics) is the underlying principles. Statistical models are incomprehensible; they provide no insight. Statistical models may provide an accurate … Continue reading On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning →

Darrel Bradford: only watch a dragon eat its tail for so long before you feel compelled to intervene. As I’ve watched the education community react to Robert Pondiscio’s argument that the left is driving conservatives out of education reform, I’ve been increasingly frustrated to see so many people I like and respect (from Marilyn Rhames … Continue reading Social Justice, Education Reform and How This Whole Left-Right Feud Is Missing the Point →

Raul Carrillo: As the presidential primaries rumble on, the candidates — especially Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton — have debated college affordability and Wall Street greed. Unfortunately, no one is confronting the links between the two. More than 40 million Americans have student debt, totaling at least $1.2 trillion. On average, borrowers out of school … Continue reading How Wall Street Profits From Student Debt →

David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh: Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, … Continue reading Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. →

Grey Gordon, Aaron Hedlund: We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality-maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle environment. We measure how much changes in … Continue reading Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition (Federal Tax $ Spending And Student Loans…) →

Chrotopher Phillips: An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a … Continue reading The New Math: A Political History →

Emmanuel Felton: High-school students who enjoy obscure vocabulary and puzzle-like math problems might want to sign up for the SAT now, before the 89-year-old college-admissions test is revamped this March to better reflect what students are learning in high-school classrooms in the age of the Common Core. While other standardized tests have also been criticized … Continue reading How the Common Core Is Transforming the SAT →

Diana Cembreros Castaño: The objective of this research is to present a web application that predicts L2 text readability. The software is intended to assist ESL teachers in selecting texts written at a level of difficulty that corresponds with the target students’ lexical competence. The ranges are obtained by statistical approach using distribution probability and … Continue reading A Software/Design Method for Predicting Readability for ESL Students →

Open Library: It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. Over two years in the planning and execution, the platform starts with seven journals, supported by 99 institutions. Our estimated publication volume for year one is 150 articles across these venues. The economics of this work out … Continue reading Open library For The Humanities Launches →

Virginia Postrel: Worrying about the angst of high-achieving students has become a minor industry. “America’s culture of hyperachievement among the affluent” has led to suicides, depression, and anxiety among college students, suggested a July New York Times feature. “These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on … Continue reading Princeton’s School of Hard Knocks →

Laura a Waters: But for both conservative Republicans and teacher union leaders, this amendment is the hill to die on, the former because of resentment towards federal intrusion into state autonomy and the latter because of resentment towards accountability. Here’s an excerpt of a letter from NEA to the U.S. Senate: On behalf of the … Continue reading Elizabeth Warren Brooks No Bullies as She Fights for Progressive Accountability in Federal Education Laws →

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield: I’m tired of band-aids on university policy problems that never heal the underlying wounds, so I asked that we faculty do some new things in a piece that appeared in Inside Higher Ed last week. Called “Time for a New Strategy,” it argues that defenses of tenure and academic freedom … Continue reading Academic Freedom Among Serious People →

Joss Winn: The body of work discussed here provides a substantial and original contribution to knowledge in the following ways: By subjecting ‘open education’ to a negative critique based on Marx’s categories of the commodity, value and labour, I reveal fundamental features of the ‘academic commons’ that have not been identified through critiques that neglect … Continue reading A critique of Higher Education Through the Law of Value →

Daniel Wagner: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating whether some collection agencies are involved in lawsuits against student loan borrowers even when the companies can’t prove their legal right to collect on the loans, according to agency documents and people familiar with the investigation. The CFPB is weighing “whether Bureau action is warranted” against … Continue reading Feds Probe Debt Collector Targeting Student Lenders →

Eliane Glaser: Time allocation forms, research excellence framework documentation, module monitoring, and research funding applications: these Gradgrindian horrors are the subject of many a senior common room rant, and they have been extensively documented in these pages. Academics are spending less and less time thinking, reading and writing, and ever more time filling out forms. … Continue reading Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains? →

Michael Schonhardt: Some days ago a number of articles and blogposts appeared in my twitter timeline criticizing “twitter streams that do nothing more than post ‘old’ pictures and little tidbits of captions for them”1 , e.g. https://twitter.com/medievalreacts Sarah Werner (whose blogpost I highly recommend!) and others rightly criticized these accounts for using unattributed and unidentified … Continue reading Identifying manuscripts in social media →

Peter Schmidt: College administrations react to hate crimes, hate speech, and other high-profile incidents of bias by focusing mainly on repairing their institution’s reputation, two new studies conclude. The administrations’ responses generally paper over underlying prejudices in the campus culture, leaving the victims at risk of further harm in the future, argue the researchers, who … Continue reading Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find →

Barry Garelick, via a kind email: “I am not an outright proponent of the philosophy that ‘If you want something done right, you have to live in the past’, but when it comes to how to teach math there are worse philosophies to embrace,” Barry Garelick explains as he continues from where he left off … Continue reading Teaching Math in the 21st Century →

Dan Walters: Brown, meanwhile, is negotiating privately with Napolitano – herself a former governor of Arizona – to see whether compromise is reachable. A first increment of the threatened tuition increase has been postponed, but publicly Napolitano is threatening to cap admissions by California students. The amount of state UC aid involved is relatively tiny … Continue reading Jerry Brown, Scott Walker confronting universities →

Robert P. George and Yuval Levin, via Will Fitzhugh: “If broken families become not the exception but the rule, then our society, and most especially its most vulnerable members, would be profoundly endangered.” This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family. The full series will appear … Continue reading Family Breakdown and Poverty To flourish, our nation must face some hard truths →

Laura Waters There’s a relatively new meme running through the edu-blogosphere that claims that the Common Core and its attendant standardized tests are built on the false premise that all kids should prepare for college and careers. For example, on Monday New Jersey blogger Marie Cornfield claimed that the “big, fat myth of standardized testing … Continue reading New Anti-Reform Meme: Too Many Kids Go to College →

David Bromwich: Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower prods us to think about the crisis of higher education. But is there a crisis? Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much … Continue reading The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Education →